'I thought you were a Mexican or something': Re/Visioning Borders of the Global South in Rakesh Roshan's Kites

Abstract

Despite histories that share a deep, wounded sensibility about borders, Mexico and India have relatively few overt meditations on potential parallels. This paper proposes to look at a 2010 Indian action film set in Las Vegas and Mexico featuring Bollywood mega-star Hrithik Roshan and the Mexican-Japanese-Uruguyan telenovela actress Bárbara Mori — who play immigrants of Indian and Mexican descent in the United States. In the film, their star-crossed love takes the pair across the US–Mexico border, where at different times in the movie they find themselves negotiating legal systems (getting papers first from the United States, then Mexico), language barriers (the movie is about one-third each Spanish, English, and Hindi), and an evil casino owner's henchmen. We look at the film from a bifocal perspective, across the US–Mexican border, but also across cultural expectations around a series of differently weighted concepts in South Asian and US understandings, including the key title image of the kite, along with other images such as trains, deserts, names, and bodies. Our analysis challenges border studies with its predominant focus on the US–Mexico border and the postcolonial paradigm of encounters between the metropolis and the margin underlying investigations of diaspora, hybridity, and transnationalism.